Is this a possibility?
 

Hi,
Alright, so I've had a nice distro of Mandrake 10.0 running on my older desktop computer for months. Now I have a new laptop, running Windows XP Home. Now, I've searched around the forums and couldn't really find anything that would help me, and what I'd like to do is resize my WXP partition (without reformatting or losing any data) and install a linux distro on the newly empty space. So when I boot up my laptop, I get the choice of using either my existing Windows XP setup or going into a Linux Distro (LILO or GRUB).

And this leaves me with two questions:

A) Is this possible to do?
B) What would you suggest as a distro for a laptop? (Something that supports wireless internet, easily, and isn't overly bloated (Mandriva and Fedora for example). Ubuntu and SUSE sound good...

Thanks.

I've heard of something on the knoppix disc called qtparted, but have never looked for or tried it myself. What I did when my root partition filled up was used partition magic by norton, and that worked like a charm. If qtparted doesn't work out you may want to look into investing in partition magic as it is a wonderful tool for all partitioning needs.

Alunduil

Thanks for the tip!

You could use your mandrake 10.0 distro as well. Mandrake/Mandriva uses "DiskDrake" for partitioning, but most all distro's have some sort of non-destructive partiotioning software like Parted or Qtparted. You will deffinitally want NON-DISTRUCTIVE. Like, Not FDISK.... I have used Partition Magic too, and works great for Linux Partitions.

Also when you create your partitions you may want to make separate /home and maybe a Fat32 partition in addition to / and SWAP. You most likely have NTFS on your XP partition and you will be able to read it fine but writing to it is a different matter, and you will have to use Samba or something similar.

If you use the Mandrake distro you have. It uses LiLo for the boot-loader and should have no problem detecting your XP installation.

Good Luck

KC

From within Windows you can obtain a copy of Partition Magic, and use it to resize Windows and make space for Linux. Leave about 5GB for the install and the occasional Linux-speific downloads. If you find you want to access files, you can mount your Windows partition from within Linux. The easiest distro to deal with would most likely be Mandrake (now Mandriva). Fedora Core 3 is pretty straightforward itself tho, as well.